BOULESTIN, ST JAMES'S

French brasserie food with flair

The buzz When I used to edit ES Magazine, we used to send our excellent restaurant reviewers, Toby Young and Rachel Johnson, to visit places once the the broadsheet reviewers, the bloggers and the neophilists had been and gone. Six months in and you had a good idea of whether an establishment had a chance of sticking around - did it have a regular clientele? Did the chef nail every dish every time, even if Jay Rayner wasn’t around to judge? I decided to do the same now, and visit Boulestin in St James’s which opened to rave reviews in September.

The lowdown This is a talented New Zealander (Joel Kissin - a former Conran associate) giving us his take on a famous old French restaurant (Boulestin) that used to be a smoky basement in Covent Garden but closed in the 90s and is now reborn as an airy bright space with a courtyard on St James’s. On a Friday lunchtime in spring it was absolutely heaving with well-coiffed Mayfair ladies and well-oiled Mayfair gents sipping chilled Chablis and red Burgundy respectively while inspecting the menu with serious intent.

Menu highlights And what a menu it is. This is proper French brasserie food and that means coq au vin, oeuf en gelee, cassoulets every Monday and a whole offal section. Every dish that’s especially French is highlighted in red, so I went for those - it seemed rude not to. So I had jambon persille with celeriac remoulade followed by tete de veau with sauce ravigote. Eating veal brains at lunchtime is quite punchy but actually it was utterly delicious and not too heavy at all. My fellow diners, one of whom remembers the old Boulestin fondly, tucked into roast cod, potato gallette with salmon and caviar, and the veal cutlet with sage and lemon.

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Perfect for… A treaty lunch or an indulgent dinner. When the weather warms up I’m heading for that terrace - I want to eat my Agen prunes with Sauternes custard in the sun.

Final word If this means the 90s revival is really up and running, we're clearly in for a wave of cropped tops, ripped jeans, DM boots, Madonna and Nirvana. Brace yourselves.